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Learning Evaluation Assignment

Decent Essays

I expect this piece of research to give me confidence. In future, I shall not be afraid to look at a new idea and try it out – under controlled conditions – to see whether it improves my practice. I recognise that a willingness to experiment in this way, bearing in mind the curriculum, and the demands of achievement criteria, will keep teaching and learning fresh and exciting. At best, the impact on the learners will be to maintain or enhance their enthusiasm, and to improve their ability to understand new material and remember it.
Data collection will have to be very simple, as the understanding of the learners is limited. I will probably opt for a before-and-after test of retention, possibly delivered orally, and recorded by TAs, whose …show more content…

There is also the possibility that some individuals might become over-excited. In that case, they would also be encouraged to sit out with a TA, and I should have to reconsider the type of movement/rest introduced. I would not want to exclude any learner from taking part, so I should have to find an inclusive activity, with which to break up the learning “chunks”. I shall not be doing anything which moves away from the school’s code of conduct.

When I planned my piece of action research, I had in mind a little piece of research in mice from 1999 by van Praag et al. (1999) which showed that mice that exercised regularly became better at learning than sedentary mice; in other words, physical activity may be a way to boost brain function and increase learning. I first had to decide whether my approach would be inductive or deductive. For an inductive approach, I should have first collected data from my learners about their preferred/ most successful methods of learning, and results of previous teaching and learning sessions. I should then have studied it, looking for patterns to emerge, relevant to my ideas about stimulating their brains through exercise, and delivering the lesson in short “chunks”. From the data and the reflection, I would then have produced an hypothesis, which I would then have tested, thus moving from data to theory.
An example of an inductive study is Ferguson and colleagues’ (Ferguson, Kim, & McCoy, 2011) analysis of empirical data to

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